Ocean Weeds

Ocean Weeds  (Updated 1/6/16)

    To simply hear the word "weeds" implies that it is something unwanted, a pest of sorts, something that grows almost everywhere and without abandon.  So it's odd to think that this might be something occurring in the ocean; but then why not?  Different atmosphere (water) but more land area.  And a growth rate of nearly an inch a day?  And edible?  And a purifier and cleanser?  And virtually ignored?  But not entirely, for if you've eaten ice cream or used shampoo or toothpaste, you've likely been exposed to it.  Those of you who eat sushi and wondered what that black paper-like wrapping was have also been contributing to this massive $6 billion industry (the snack side alone reached nearly $500 million last year and is growing by 30% annually).  It would appear that this is a weed no more, but rather a new crop that could, it's speculated, replace all of our land agriculture with just 1% of it's land surface...which is no big deal, really, for we are talking about the ocean.

    Seaweed has been around for centuries and in many countries, has been eaten for just as long (before you get stereotyping, it was and is eaten by the Welsh with one British food writer, Jane Grigson, saying purple laver is "the one seaweed we can decently count in English or Welsh cooking as a vegetable," as told to Dana Goodyear in her article in The New Yorker.  Seaweed is the unlovely name for marine macroalgae, an enormous, varied family of more than ten thousand species.  Most are benthic: they attach to rocks, seabed, or other seaweeds with a clamplike structure called a holdfast.  They come in brown, red, and green; some iridesce.  Mating, they use eyespots, release pheromones, or extrude slime.  Certain species can reproduce vegetatively.  They can come equipped with floats so that their leaves—called blades—stay close enough to the surface to photosynthesize. Instead of rigid cell walls like those found in land plants, seaweeds’ cell walls are rich in sugars to help them bend rather than break in swells.  These sugars—known as alginates, carrageenans, and agars—thicken, bind, and emulsify toothpaste, shampoo, skin cream, and countless industrial foods, including most ice cream...The ocean covers seventy per cent of the earth and produces less than two per cent of our food.  To grow the rest, we use almost forty per cent of the world’s land and nearly three-quarters of our fresh water...Nearly half the world’s ocean-farmed product is seaweed.

    As a child, seaweed was nearly everywhere in our diet, but mainly as a luxury.  Even back then, seaweed's various products were not cheap.  At fancy restaurants or buffets, I remember stocking up on the various seaweed salads, from the black almost nutty-like Hijiki to the ocean-flavored green kombu strips that were seasoned with a touch of sesame oil to the delicate fern-like hairs that blended into the delicious ahi poke (cubes of raw tuna blended with various seasonings and running about $12 per pound).  It all depends on where you've grown up, of course, with each diet attracted to or repulsed by such foods.  But for me, seaweed was delicious simply as a taste...whether dried or seasoned or fresh from the ocean (but as with mushrooms, I never self-harvested, for only certain varieties are considered edible).  And for those of you just wanting to give it a try, seaweed snacks are now available in Costco (recently featured in their magazine) and Whole Foods, and of course, as a staple in many Asian markets.  Says the Costco piece about seaweed: In many Asian cultures, it's eaten as a side dish, served as a complement to rice, used as a wrapper for sushi rolls, and added to soups and salads as an alternative to lettuce.  Likewise, many European countries, namely Nordic cultures and the U.K., have also relied of seaweed to create many of their unique dishes, including laverbread, snacks, puddings, drinks and oatmeal.

    But there was more.  According to the piece in The New Yorker, seaweed might not only lower your cholesterol, but apparently captures everything from nitrogen to carbon dioxide to phosperous, a possible saving grace to our excessive fertilizer usage and carbon usage that is threatening our oceans and our atmosphere.  Says author Goodyear in the piece: ...seaweed’s most compelling property may be its ability to scrub, absorbing excess nitrogen and phosphorous, deposited in the water by agricultural runoff and wastewater, and dissolved carbon dioxide from combusted fossil fuels. (More than a quarter of the CO₂ released into the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean.)  Too much nitrogen and phosphorous can cause algal blooms, which, when they go bust, leave deoxygenated dead zones where little can survive.  Excess carbon contributes to ocean acidification, which dissolves coral reefs and harms shell-forming creatures on which many of the fish we eat depend.  Research on aquaculture in Asia has shown that one ton of dried kelp can contain as much as a third of a ton of carbon.  Rust (Mike Rust, an aquaculture scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has estimated that if we can accelerate seaweed production by fifteen per cent a year (the current growth rate is nine per cent) by 2050 that biomass will be able to remove eighteen per cent of the nitrogen and sixty-one per cent of the phosphorous contributed to the ocean by fertilizers annually, and will take up six per cent of the ocean’s emissions-related carbon...Still, it would take decades of aggressive planting to lower atmospheric CO₂ below three hundred and fifty parts per million, the level that most climatologists say is necessary to avert planetary disaster.  Seaweed might have a more meaningful influence in highly sensitive areas, such as coastal waterways.  In Puget Sound, where the pteropods—tiny marine snails known as sea butterflies—are showing signs of dissolution from intensifying acidity and dead zones have been spotted, a study is under way to measure how seaweed cultivation may alter the local chemistry.  The study will also look at potential problems associated with seaweeds’ spongelike powers.  Hijiki, the spiky brown seaweed often served at Japanese restaurants, is known to have elevated amounts of arsenic; according to Kelp Watch, which was established after the Fukushima nuclear disaster to monitor radioactive isotopes in kelp from Mexico to Alaska, kelp is a powerful concentrator of cesium.  A primary goal of the research in Puget Sound is to propose ways to safely direct seaweeds into the human food stream.  “We need to create a culinary bow wave for sea vegetables,” Betsy Peabody, one of the investigators, told me.

    So, with relatively few controls over where the seaweed you eat, or might eat, was harvested or what chemicals or isotopes it might contain, what is a consumer to do?  The dried seaweed used by Costco is "grown in the cold waters of a UNESCO biosphere reserve area, ensuring clean, uncontaminated waters," said the assistant foods buyer, Gigi Jataas.  But is it tested for radioactive isotopes?  (Costco's response: We have tested for arsenic (results were zero) but radiation is not an issue, our product is from Korea - not Japan, it is farmed in Shinan ocean where UNESCO has designated as a UNESCO clean zone.  Also, the government performs the test for the quality assurance. )  Quite likely, as seaweed begins to catch on as a sustainable and harvestable product, inspections and regulations will become more and more stringent.  And the average diet, at least at this point, consumes little seaweed.  But all of that may change as we begin to discover that this "weed," might prove to be anything but a pest.  As with the much-aligned dandelion (it, too, has many beneficial qualities, even as we seek to rid it from our yards and walkways with any chemical necessary...special flame burners have been developed just for burning the live plants without having to bend over, perhaps a sad example of our desire to both escape exercise and to destroy something we consider unwanted at any cost).

    Once again, something before our eyes has gone unnoticed until now; and this weed just might prove to be one of our saving graces.  But if that is so, one has to wonder just how many more chances we will be given.  As author Dana Goodyear pointed out with one of the new breed of seaweed farmers in the northeast: The fisherman, David Blaney, had driven down from Point Judith, Rhode Island, where his family has been farming and fishing the coast for three hundred years.  His people used to fertilize their crops with seaweed, insulate their houses with it, and eat it in hard times.  He is sixty-seven, white-bearded, taciturn; around his neck he wore the tooth of a mako shark that tried to kill him when he caught it while long-lining for tuna off the Grand Banks.  In the course of his career, he said, he’d trawled for cod on huge boats known as Big Green Dump Trucks and, when the cod ran out, for swill like butterfish and whiting; then there was only squid to catch, then nothing much at all. 

    Seaweed loves tidal changes and colder waters, and is doing its best evolution-wise to sustain its lifestyle.  But kelp forests were also once over-harvested and decimated during the WW II period (and only stopped some ten years ago in certain areas); and our ocean waters do seem to be warming as well.  So is it too late?  Our discoveries are just beginning and on the positive side, we now seem willing (not desperate but willing) to both explore and protect our resources...the new year has just begun and perhaps, just perhaps, this will indeed be a year of changes.  Fresh outlooks can bring us fresh insights, and perhaps a fresh smile as we bite into a salad and taste something totally different...a bite of the sea, a bite of our origins, a bite of where we emerged oh so long ago.